Part One: The Meaning Of
Private
Property
By Bradley
Harrington
“The right to life is
the source of all rights - and the right to property is their only
implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.” - Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” 1963
-
As most of us are aware
by now, both Cheyenne’s Governing Body and the Laramie County Commission have
signed off on “PlanCheyenne” (“a community-driven plan that charts our course
for the future,”
www.plancheyenne.org).
But those sign-offs were
not without protest, sometimes by hundreds of Cheyenne-area residents, and to
say that those protests were a bit on the contentious side would be the reserved
way to describe events. Protests that led to several amendments, with the
Laramie County version in
particular.
By and large, though,
it’s a done deal - and the violations of private property rights contained in
PlanCheyenne are immune from correction for the next five
years.
Before it is possible to
intelligently analyze those violations, however - or to project a better
solution to “community planning” that contains no such flaws - a bit of history
needs to come first, to provide the proper context for such
considerations.
500 years ago, Europe
was ruled by various kings, lords and vassals, and these rulers disposed of the
lives and possessions of the peasants residing in their fiefs as they saw
fit.
The “common man” was
utterly unable, both politically and ideologically, to resist the onslaught
of such feudalistic schemes. He got what was handed to him whether he liked it
or not, and his opinion was not sought prior to such disposal. He was a land-holder not a land-owner.
But new winds were
beginning to blow across the continent, fueled by the intellectual hurricanes of
the Reformation and the Renaissance - and it wasn’t much longer after that
before a great many people began to challenge those
norms.
And the greatest of
those, by far, was the English philosopher John Locke - who, by 1689, in his
“Second Treatise of Government,” was declaring that “government has no other end
but the preservation of property.” Imagine that; this guy actually thought the
rule of “society” should be subordinated to moral
law!
Locke’s ideas, in turn,
blew like wildfire throughout an England torn asunder by repeated civil wars -
and, more importantly, to England’s colonial offspring as well, the future
United States of
America.
And it was here that Locke’s ideas, as practiced
and supported by Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
James Madison and Thomas Paine, took root - and to say that such ideas blasted
the rule of kings sky-high would not be an understatement, as witness the series
of tumultuous events that led to
1776.
The new wind had
arrived: The “Divine Right of Kings” was no more, and the future lay in freedom,
capitalism, private property - and the resulting Industrial
Revolution.
And as Americans soon
discovered, two key offshoots of private property quickly established
themselves:
(1) Individually,
private property guaranteed and served as the foundation for all the freedoms
Americans came to enjoy. For the first time in human history, a man could order
a would-be dictator off his property and have it backed by the legal system -
provided he gave the same respect to the property of others he demanded for
himself.
(2) Socially, the free
interplay of private property rights began functioning as the objective arbiter
and political means of resolving disputes and conflicts among individuals. We
became a nation of “laws and not of men,” where “might” was replaced with
“right.” In the political arena, for those who wished to expend the efforts to
earn and acquire it, men had become property-owners, not merely property-holders.
And the result? Our
forebears carved the most moral and magnificent civilization in history out of a
wilderness. Private property rights, both individually and socially, worked. But the core and essence of
private property rights is that they are absolute - they cannot be legally
tampered with by one man with a gun or a million men with
votes.
But, alas, it did not
last, for American institutions were not without their inconsistencies in regard
to such absolutism (both slavery and the so-called constitutional “right” to
regulate interstate commerce come to mind).
Consequently, by the
late 1800s and early 1900s, such inconsistencies had deepened to the point where
“Progressivism” and other forms of collectivism had taken serious hold, thus
spawning a whole new “civilized” outlook on the way society should be organizing
itself. Such outlooks led directly to the idea of government-mandated “community
planning” - and that idea, in turn, has led us to
“PlanCheyenne.”
So - just what IS the plan, what is wrong with it and
what needs to supplant it? More on that in Part
Two...
Bradley Harrington is a
computer technician and a writer who lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming; he can be
reached at
brad@bradandbarbie.com.
********************
March 25,
2014
Part Two: Planners Plan
While Property Owners Weep
By Bradley
Harrington
“What is prudence in the
conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
- Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations,” 1776 -
In Part One, we engaged
in a (very) brief analysis of the evolution of private property rights, the
manner in which they function completely or not at all, and the fashion in which
they were superseded by the idea of “community planning” in general - and the
idea of PlanCheyenne in particular.
So: Just what IS the plan, what is wrong with it and
what needs to supplant it?
PlanCheyenne, according
to its website at www.plancheyenne.org, is “a community-driven
plan that charts our course for the future.” Well, who could possibly object to
a plan? What, do us reactionaries
opposed to PlanCheyenne believe that we shouldn’t even have a plan?
Right from the gate,
therefore, the issue is being foisted upon us as a question of Planning vs. No
Planning. This is a false alternative - and, if not challenged as such, the
planners will win every time, because it’s obvious to everyone that man by his
nature is a being of long-term range and goals and needs a plan in order to
properly move forward.
The true issue, however,
is not whether we need a plan - but
who it is that’s to do the planning.
Will it be property owners with a vested interest in the rational use and
disposal of their property - or local-county-state-federal bureaucrats who have
no interest beyond the next funding cycle or election?
- And bureaucrats, it
needs to be mentioned, who are doing their “planning” through the spending of
enormous levels of federal dollars - and who openly admit that their purpose in
doing so lies in acquiring even more
federal dollars. “FREE” federal
dollars, as I’ve heard mentioned more times than I care to
count.
And that, right there,
is the first problem with PlanCheyenne and the one that involves the greatest
abrogation of property rights - because those federal dollars, far from being
“FREE,” are only made possible by a
previous act of theft on the grandest scale, through confiscatory
taxation.
Which raises two
questions:
(1) Are we to believe
that we are so poor, as a community, that we need to rely upon the
rights-destroying federal machine in
order to fund our own infrastructure? That we must steal money from someone else
just to survive and function?
(2) And what kind of
independence do we have, in such a case? By accepting that federal loot, have we
not obliterated our own autonomy as a community and become beholden to our
federal masters?
But the hits don’t stop
there, for specific issues with PlanCheyenne present themselves on the
property-rights level as well - such as plans that get drawn by planners who see
no problem with merrily drawing South Cheyenne feeder roads right through
people’s kitchens and living rooms.
And if you don’t think
the planners won’t even blink at seizing property as they “deem necessary”
through eminent domain in order to achieve their goals, then you must have been
on Mars when the City of Cheyenne chose to steal a large chunk of the Hollywood
Video’s parking lot in order to construct the Pershing
Roundabout.
And that’s the second
big problem with PlanCheyenne: That “community-driven” plans operate in complete
disregard to the property rights of the rightful owners of the properties in
question.
In that sense, with
thanks to the collectivistic notion of “community planning,” the planners have
become the new feudalists, where your opinions or permissions are no longer
sought or required for your property’s use and disposal. Once again, just like
in Europe in days of old, you have become a land-holder not a land-owner. And down that path lies the
destruction of your freedom, since it is property rights that make that freedom
possible.
So: In order to protect
those freedoms from federal assault, PlanCheyenne needs to be scrapped and the
feds need to be sent packing. There’s always “free” cheese in a
mousetrap.
If some kind of
confiscatory tax structure is truly necessary in order to fund community
infrastructure projects (which it isn’t, but that’s not going to change anytime
soon) - let it be through taxes collected on the local level. That would at least allow
us to maintain our community autonomy.
And, once the federal
rubble is cleared out of the way, we’re free to engage in true planning, i.e., planning where the
property owners and developers sit down with each other and negotiate the best
courses of future action that respect the property rights of
everybody.
Now that’s a plan we
could all live
with.
Bradley Harrington is a
computer technician and a writer who lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming; he can be
reached at brad@bradandbarbie.com.
